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Saturday, June 17, 2006

Muhammad Dahlan

I meant to ask William, who knows him well, what happened to Muhammad Dahlan. Though I forgot to mention it, the below article was published in the IHT today:

In Gaza, a nemesis of Hamas

By Steven Erlanger, New York TimesFRIDAY, JUNE 16, 2006

Muhammad Dahlan, Fatah's most powerful figure in Gaza, is the man Hamas most likes to despise, with officials constantly referring to him as "corrupt and diverted" from the cause of Palestinian nationalism. They accuse him of working with the Americans and the Israelis to foment chaos and undermine the Hamas government.

Dahlan, a trim man of 44 who has risen to power and comparative wealth from the slums of the Khan Yunis refugee camp, says he doesn't care, that Hamas is simply looking for a scapegoat on which to blame its own mounting difficulties.

"The main reason for recent clashes is the sense of Hamas's failure," he said in a 90-minute interview in his well-guarded office here. "Hamas is in a crisis, and thus the Palestinians are in a crisis, and they try to push this crisis onto others."

Dahlan was in full flow, speaking with steady contempt.

"They used to run a club here and a foundation there, and they thought governing would be easy," he said. "They thought dealing with Israel would be easy. They thought they could concentrate on the Arab world and the rest didn't matter."

He added that Khaled Meshal, one of Hamas's leaders in exile, "said that if the doors of the West are closed, those of the East will be open. But a week later they discovered it's different.

"They're spinning in a circle and looking for a scapegoat - first it's Fatah, then Dahlan. They say they're besieged - but Arafat was besieged in his bedroom! We've been besieged for six years! But we in Fatah never did anything to provoke civil war, and we never stopped salaries, either."

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, has seized on a document prepared by prisoners, led by a Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, that calls for a unified Palestinian government and program that would support a Palestinian state within prewar 1967 boundaries, thus implicitly recognizing Israel.

If Hamas does not come to an agreement with him to accept the document, Abbas has declared a referendum for July 26, which Hamas says is illegal.

"Marwan did a great job in the jail on the document," Dahlan said, getting a senior Hamas prisoner to sign what "is the first document in our lives" that all Palestinian factions managed to negotiate. "I told Abu Mazen, 'Don't even read the document, just accept it.' And Abu Mazen used the document in a good way," putting Hamas into a political conundrum.

Ghazi Hamad, the Hamas government spokesman, said in an interview that he was optimistic the Abbas-Hamas talks would lead to a political agreement without a referendum, allowing Abbas full authority as head of the Palestine Liberation Organization to negotiate with Israel on the basis of the 1967 boundaries.

But Hamad also acknowledges that the economic siege on the Hamas government by the West because it has not recognized Israel's right to exist, forswear violence or accept previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements has put the government into a crisis, unable to pay most salaries for nearly four months now. "This is a big challenge for us, and we're trying to solve it through the president and political flexibility," Hamad said. "It risks us as a government."

Abbas has told Hamas "if you approve the political document, we can convince the West to pay and lift the siege," Hamad said. "There's some flexibility in the European Union, but in the United States, I don't know."

On Friday in Brussels, the European Union said it had completed a temporary aid mechanism that, pending agreement from Washington, would be delivered in July and provide allowances to the poorest in Gaza, ensure fuel supplies and help keep health and social services going without dealing with the Palestinian Authority. The initial European allocation of about €100 million, or $126 million, is about the cost of one month's salary bill for the Palestinian Authority. The Europeans also want Israel to use the mechanism and stop withholding some $50 million a month in taxes and duties it collects for the Palestinians.

Dahlan says that the economic boycott hurts ordinary Palestinians and not Hamas itself, which has its own sources of income for its own loyalists. And he says that despite what Hamas believes, he wants it to succeed in the reality of politics while Fatah moves finally to reform itself.

"We're not against Hamas politically," he said. "But they don't have the right to starve the people. If you want to fight the U.S. and Israel and Fatah, fine, but don't do it on the backs of the people," he said. "It's the government's job to pay salaries, and if they can't do that, how can they achieve our rights?"

As for Hamas's attacks on him, Dahlan tries to appear unconcerned. "They say you're corrupt, or a collaborator or an unbeliever, depending on your luck that day," he said.

"If defending Fatah is being 'diverted,' fine," he said. "I've been in Fatah 30 years, and it's my home, not the Palestinian Authority. I was jailed for Fatah and deported for Fatah and lost friends for Fatah. They think because I'm defending Fatah, they open a war against me."

As for longstanding accusations that he used his previous positions as head of the Preventive Security police and of Fatah in Gaza to benefit from Palestinian Authority monopolies on oil sales and cement, as well from the granting of building contracts and exit permits and the importation of goods through the Karni crossing between Israel and Gaza, Dahlan also scoffs. "Hamas now has all the corruption files," he said. "I choose silence. If I wear a nice necktie, they say I'm corrupt, and if I take it off, they say it's false modesty. My house, some say, is a Riviera, but it's 200 square meters."

The biggest problem now, he says, is that "only Israel knows what it wants" in the region. In his view, Israel wants to ensure that it has no Palestinian partner with whom to negotiate so it can continue its unilateral actions, "including the confiscation of our lands, the enlarging and deepening of the colonialism in the settlements and the assassination of innocents."

Dahlan talked of the anger among Palestinians about the explosion on Beit Lahiya beach on June 9 that killed seven members of one family and the deaths four days later of eight more civilians in an attack on an Islamic Jihad rocket team.

Israel says that its shells could not have caused the explosion on the beach. Dahlan scoffed again. "It's a scandal, and the Americans don't even condemn it," he said. "It wasn't the Israelis? Who was it? The Palestinian air force?"

Then his mood switched again, to the analytical. In a way, he mused, it doesn't matter, saying: "Palestinians will believe Israel did it, even if it didn't."